Jim's Overnight Task Force

Next door to the White House, in the stately old Executive Office Building, a nine-man ad hoc team held its first meeting last week. In Washington, task forces and special committees bloom and die like cherryblossoms --and often make about as much impact on policy--but this group is different. Its boss is James Schlesinger, 48, he of the omnivorous intellect and encyclopedic resume, the man chosen by Jimmy Carter to take charge of the nation's energy problems. The group's goal: to produce a 50-page document outlining, as the President put it in last week's press conference, "a comprehensive, long-range energy policy" in just over two months. Deadline: April 20.

"I offer no miracle cure," says Schlesinger. To the contrary, practically all of the elements likely to turn up in the new plan have been discussed--though, alas, not acted on--for years. Schlesinger's group already has general principles sketched out. It is clear that the policy will focus on what Washington has begun to call "the two Cs": conservation and coal. First, tough conservation measures must be taken so that the nation can buy time to develop well-considered alternatives to oil and gas as fuels. Next, a determined effort must be made to get many power plants to switch to coal, so that the U.S. can reduce its dependence on imported oil.

The plan will doubtless provide incentives to encourage domestic oil and gas companies to push production. But it also will include safeguards against extravagant profits--possibly a "windfall profits tax" on energy companies that are allowed to raise prices. Finally, it seems sure that the program will not relax tough environmental controls on energy use. David Freeman, 51, Schlesinger's senior aide, puts the point in a gloriously mixed metaphor: "We start out with the cornerstone of our energy policy cut from environmental cloth."

Tall Order. It is a dizzyingly tall order indeed, but Jim Schlesinger thrives on rising to the highest occasions. A Harvard economics Ph.D., he has served as strategic studies director for the Rand Corp., assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense. He gets to the office by 7 a.m., rarely departs before 9:30 at night, and rides his staff hard, sometimes demanding an answer minutes after he has assigned a complex question. The energy-plan team works twelve-hour days and fully expects to put in weekends. Says one staffer: "Every day here seems like a week."

Aide Freeman, overseer of the respected 1974 Ford Foundation energy study A Time to Choose, has overnight become a Washington force in his own right. A few weeks ago, he was an obscure member of Carter's transition team; now he occupies a grand office with a fireplace overlooking the presidential swimming pool. He promises a first-class report: "We're not going to settle for nickel-and-diming." Most other task-force members are keen-minded generalists in the Schlesinger mold, more schooled in problem solving than in energy.

The team will rely heavily on the advice of experts in the Federal Energy Administration and the Energy Research and Development Administration. It also will hire consultants and welcome unsolicited advice from industry and public interest groups. Carter has instructed the group to seek the counsel, somehow, of the public at large, and Schlesinger already visits Capitol Hill almost daily to meet with such energy mavins as Senators Jennings Randolph (a coal expert) and Howard Baker (Washington's reigning specialist on the Tennessee Valley Authority).

Carter and Schlesinger are of uncannily like mind on energy matters, and the President pledged last week that "I don't intend to fail" on the energy question. By no coincidence, that is the same language Carter used when he was merely an ex-Governor of Georgia setting out on the preposterous job of making himself President.

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